THE ENDURING ART
OF JEROME TIGER
TALK BY 
M.J. VAN DEVENTER-SHELTON
NOON 3/21/18 
COWBOY & WESTERN 
HERITAGE MUSEUM 

THE ENDURING ART OF JEROME TIGER

March 21, 2018  Brown Bag Noon Luncheon Program 

Tangle at Stick Ball by Jerome Richard Tiger, courtesy of National Cowboy Hall of and Western Heritage Museum

         Author M.J. Van Deventer-Shelton will give a talk "The Enduring Work 
of Jerome Tiger," very influential Muscogee Creek-Seminole artist, at 12 noon at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1700 N. E. 63rd Street in Oklahoma City. For more information call 405.478.2250.

               M.J. Van Deventer-Shelton grew up in Muskogee and became acquainted with Jerome Tiger through an English class at Muskogee Central High School in the late 1950s.  Sitting next to Jerome in that class, she often watched him draw while the rest of the class labored over diagramming complex sentences.

          Fast forward to 1967 and the untimely accidental death of Jerome Tiger. By the late 1970s, M. J. embarked on a research journey to piece together the fragments of Jerome's life, visit the artists and collectors he influenced and research the enduring quality of his art ~ paintings that changed the face of Native American art.

          While serving as the Director of Publications and editor of Persimmon Hill for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum for 18 years, she had the opportunity to study Jerome's art and become friends with Arthur and Shifra Silberman, whose gift of Jerome's art has made this museum's Jerome Tiger paintings the largest archive of his art.

          M.J. is a graduate of  Northeastern State University in Tahlequah and received a Master's Degree in Communications from Oklahoma State University. She did post graduate work in the pre-law program at Tulsa Junior College and at Syracuse University in New York on a Wall Street Journal Fellowship.

          For 25 years, she was a newspaper reporter/editor for the Stillwater News Press, Tulsa World, the Daily Oklahoman, Fort Worth Star Telegram and the Tulsa Tribune, which nominated her for a Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting. During that time, she also was an adjunct professor of journalism at OSU and the University of Central Oklahoma.

          An award-winning journalist, her articles have appeared in Southwest Art, Oklahoma Today, Tulsa People, Oklahoma Magazine, Traditional Home, Cowboys & Indians and Triple AAA's Home & Away. She is the author or co-author of 10 books, and is currently completing a biography on the well-known Oklahoma sculptor, Harold T. Holden.

          Her passions are writing, cooking and gardening. She is the past chairman of the Muskogee Area Master Gardeners, and the current president of the Muskogee Area Arts Council and a board member of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which has the second largest holding of Jerome's art, including his only sculpture and his last work, The Stickballer.

Editor's note: The biography was provided courtesy of   
Ms. Van De Venter-Shelton, a long-time friend and teacher of the editor.